


to him who wants it

by someone_borrowed



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Ableism, M/M, Not Canon Compliant, Period Typical Attitudes, Poetry, Pre-World War II Bucky Barnes/Steve Rogers, Recreational Drug Use, Stucky Big Bang 2019, and bucky digs it, fuck everything after tws, in which steve is a nerd, lovesick numbskulls, william carlos williams poetry, woooo, yeah they get high
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-01
Updated: 2020-01-01
Packaged: 2021-02-27 07:49:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22063567
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/someone_borrowed/pseuds/someone_borrowed
Summary: Steve, Bucky, and a very old, abused book of poetry.-or, Steve and Bucky fall in love with a little help from William Carlos Williams.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Comments: 13
Kudos: 77
Collections: Stucky Big Bang 2019





	to him who wants it

_///_

_the wanderer_

_“Give me the well-worn spirit,_

_For here I have made a room for it,_

It’s a Tuesday the first time Bucky Barnes ever speaks to Steve Rogers.

Bucky stretches forward, nearly all the way out of his seat, his rickety school desk shifting and giving an alarming creak. He taps Steve Rogers on the shoulder, and the smaller boy turns around from his own desk, two rows ahead of Bucky’s. 

“Hey,” Bucky whispers, mindful of the hushed classroom. “What’s today?”

Steve Rogers purses his lips at Bucky, and says, “Tuesday.”

Then he turns back around, leaving Bucky to gape at the back of his blond head. Bucky’s surprise quickly sours into annoyance.

“I _know_ it’s Tuesday,” he replies peevishly, and Steve Rogers looks back out of the corner of his eye. 

“Why’d you ask if you know, then?” He smirks as if he’s said something very clever. 

“I meant what’s the _date,_ ” Bucky huffs.

He isn’t stupid _,_ thank you very much. It’s only that Mrs. Adler has failed to write today’s date on the board, the way she _ought_ to, and that isn’t Bucky’s fault. It’s a simple question, and there’s no reason for Steve Rogers to be acting as if Bucky is a fool for asking. Bucky just has to date his paper, same as everyone else. 

Steve Rogers stays put and doesn’t answer, and for some reason the spray of freckles on the back of his pale neck is the most infuriating sight Bucky has ever laid eyes on. 

_Well_ , Bucky thinks, if Steve Rogers won’t tell him the date, Bucky will just see for himself. He leans over even further so that his elbows rest on the empty desk between them. He cranes to catch a look at Steve Rogers’ paper, which is already finished and dated. He’s reading a weathered book now, unrelated to their assignment as far as Bucky can tell. 

“What are you doing?” Steve Rogers hisses, flinching away from Bucky’s breath on his ear. His freckled neck mottles with pink, peeking out from the collar of his ragged grey sweater. Bucky is inexplicably pleased at the sight. 

“What are _you_ doing?” Bucky retorts, reaching for the book. He can make out a couple of words on the page but Steve Rogers clutches it protectively to his chest, his lip lifting away from his teeth. 

It makes him into something near feral, his blue eyes slits in his sharp little face, and Bucky feels a shiver skitter down his spine at the sight. For a moment, Steve Rogers looks ready to bite the fingers off Bucky’s hand. 

Instead, he turns and strikes Bucky on the cheek with a bony fist. Bucky rears back with a shout, clutching his face. 

“What,” he breathes, after half a second, feeling hollow and full of air. 

He stares at Steve Rogers’ red cheeks and flared nostrils, something very close to astonishment rising in his throat. They’re close enough that he can feel the other boy’s breath on his face, coming fast and hot. 

“ _What?_ ” Bucky repeats, nonsensically, without meaning to at all. 

Shouldn’t Bucky be angry? The idea occurs fuzzily, warped around the edges like a strange echo off of a faraway wall. After all, he was just punched in the face by smug, scrawny Steve Rogers, who is staring back at him with steely, narrowed eyes. Why isn’t he angry?

At the front of the classroom, Mrs. Adler shrieks, “Steven Rogers! James Barnes!”

Bucky freezes, and so does Steve Rogers, as the classroom creaks and rustles with the sound of twenty nosy third graders turning for a look. What an eyeful they get:

Little Steve Rogers who always has half-chewed pencils and asthma cigarettes falling out of his pockets, coiled up like slinky, mad as spit at Bucky Barnes, the favored hall monitor, who is laid flat on his belly over the better part of two desks, his cheek already swelling up.

The class bursts into whispers and giggles instantly, and the frenzied sound follows Bucky for the rest of the day.

_And I will return to you forthwith_

_The youth you have long asked of me:_

“Heard you got into it with Steve Rogers,” Jonathan Edgar Brown Jr. says to Bucky during recess later that day. 

Bucky shrugs, rubbing absently at his knuckles, which Mrs. Adler had rapped with her metal-edged ruler. It still smarts, but Bucky is preoccupied by the strange feeling that he is made of soap bubbles, all gossamer and air, floating around in a vaguely boy-shaped clump. 

He looks over to where Steve Rogers sits at the bottom of the old metal slide that no one uses ever since Samantha Abbott fell off of it and broke her arm. He’s got that book in his hands again, his little pink face screwed up in concentration. When he catches Bucky looking, he scowls, lifts a middle finger, and goes back to his reading.

The soap bubble feeling intensifies.

“Don’t worry ‘bout him,” Jonathan tells Bucky in a matter-of-fact voice. “Kid’s pathetic. Got, like, a bunch of stuff wrong with him, s’why he’s always in the nurse’s. My dad said he’ll get what’s comin’ to him. Know what I mean?”

Bucky doesn’t know. He _does_ know that Jonathan’s father, Jonathan Edgar Brown Sr. was a very important business associate of Bucky’s father, and that they live in the house just down the street from Bucky’s. Bucky also knows that Steve Rogers had given Jonathan Edgar Brown Jr. a mean shiner last year, after Jonathan had stuck his gum into one of Cynthia Shears’ braids.

Bucky thinks of how Steve’s pale knuckles had split open under Mrs. Adler’s ruler, after Bucky had taken his turn. He thinks of how Steve didn’t cry, even when blood oozed and dripped and stained the sleeve of his grey sweater. He just stood there, shoulders back and not the least bit shamefaced.

Bucky turns back to Jonathan and says, “ _You’re_ pathetic. And your dad’s a drunk that don’t know shit.”

Jonathan does not walk home with Bucky from school that day.

_Stand forth, river, and give me_

_The old friend of my revels!”_

The following Wednesday, Bucky speaks to Steve Rogers for the second time.

“Hi,” Bucky says, standing over Steve Rogers, casting him in shadow.

He looks up from his seat at the end of the metal slide, scowling again. His sweater is blue today. There are freckles the color of vanilla ice cream on the delicate skin beneath his eyes, just like the ones on the back of his neck.

“ _What_ ,” Steve Rogers asks acidly, his fingers tightening around the corners of his book.

Bucky’s stomach twists and flutters. 

“I just wanted to say sorry,” he manages, in a rush. “For yesterday. I didn’t mean to make you mad. I mean, actually, I did, but not _that_ mad. And I didn’t mean to get you into trouble either. So. I’m sorry.”

Steve Rogers’ eyebrows lift, and he looks, all of a sudden, like a Christmas cookie; all stricken and white in his huge navy sweater. From here, Bucky can see the scabs on his knuckles. He can also make out the title of the slim volume: _AL QUE QUIERE!_ it declares in stately letters across the cover. Above that, in a tidy little print, it reads _A BOOK OF POEMS._

Bucky points at it. “Is that Spanish? What’s it mean?”

Steve Rogers squints suspiciously.

“What’s it to you?” He turns up his chin, as though the entire Spanish language is in his possession and he’s not about to give it away to just any old person off the street. Bucky cannot help but laugh uproariously, and Steve Rogers’ eyebrow twitches. It only makes Bucky laugh harder.

“What? What’s so funny?”

“Nothin’,” Bucky says, so light he thinks he might float away. “Nothin’ at all, Steve Rogers.”

Steve Rogers fixes him with an intense sort of look that turns Bucky’s insides to early morning mist; fine and dewy and cool, hanging in the sky. Then Steve Rogers stands up. The top of his head barely reaches Bucky’s nose, and that information makes Bucky very aware of his own hands and feet, and for some reason, the wrinkles in his button up shirt.

“Steve. Just Steve,” Steve says finally, offering Bucky his hand. The same hand he punched Bucky in the face with. The same hand that split open and left little red drops all over Mrs. Adler’s floor. Bucky takes the hand and grins so wide it hurts. 

“Alright then, Stevie.”

Steve’s scowl returns. “No.”

_“Come!” cried my mind and by her might_

_That was upon us we flew above the river_

Bucky very quickly learns all there is to know about Steve.

Steve is actually a grade behind Bucky, but he does his work in Mrs. Adler’s class because his assigned classroom is too far away from the nurse’s office. Steve has asthma, stomach ulcers, high blood pressure, a bum ear, a crooked spine, shitty eyesight, partial colorblindness, and a weak heart.

“Oh,” Steve says nonchalantly as they walk to class, pointedly _not_ watching Bucky’s eyes grow steadily wider. “And flat feet. Running’s a real pain in the ass, lemme tell ya.”

After a minute’s silence, Bucky knocks their shoulders together. “Not that you’re complaining.” 

Steve looks up, ready to be defensive and insist that he _wasn’t_ complaining, because, Bucky has found out, Steve does not complain about the things he really ought to. But then he catches sight of Bucky’s secret smile, just for the two of them, and settles.

“Real nice thing to say to an invalid,” Steve shoves at Bucky’s shoulder, and Bucky shoves right back. Steve stumbles, and Bucky doesn’t bother to right him.

“You’re a lot of things, Stevie,” Bucky says. “But you ain’t an invalid.”

Steve flushes to the tips of his goofy little ears, and mumbles something about needing to go to the library. 

_Seeking her, grey gulls among the white—_

_In the air speaking as she had willed it:_

Steve loves to read. He reads everything; comic books, and great big classic novels, and short stories, and magazines, and textbooks, and the thesauruses their classrooms keep on hand if he gets really bored. (He patently refuses to read Bucky’s pulp magazines though, out of sheer snobbery.) His favorite is poetry, though, even if he won’t admit it. 

He carries around a pocket-size collection of Emily Dickinson’s poetry, and Robert Frost’s too. He tolerates John Milton, and has a few favorite lines from Ralph Waldo Emerson, and absolutely detests Percy Bysshe Shelley.

“I love books, and comics,” Steve says, kicking at the ground, not meeting Bucky’s eyes. “I wanna make comics one day. But it’s like with poetry, you can say so much with just a couple of words. It’s plain and true, ‘cuz it’s just supposed to make you feel, make you act.”

“You ever write any?” Bucky asks.

“Me?” Steve snorts, glancing up. “Nah. I’m no poet.”

Bucky sits next to Steve on the sidewalk later, and watches him sketch. Steve likes cartoons, but he likes portraiture and still life more. Bucky watches Steve take little bits of the outside world and press them into paper, like a flower he’s saving between the pages, and thinks that Steve is wrong. He does make poetry, even if it ain’t always with words.

Even though Steve has a lot of poetry books, Bucky knows his favorite one. 

“I could lend it to you sometime, if you want,” Steve shrugs, like it doesn’t matter, even as he pulls the skinny little book out of his bag.

_"I am given, cried I, now I know it!_

He offers it to Bucky as they stand outside the school, ready to turn in opposite directions for home. The afternoon light makes Steve have to shade his eyes with one hand, the bridge of his nose pink and peeling from the sun. Bucky’s heart squeezes.

“Sure,” Bucky says, and he watches Steve walk away with his striding, uneven gait. 

Bucky falls asleep in his day clothes, _AL QUE QUIERE!_ open on his chest.

_I know now all my time is forespent!_

_For me one face is all the world!_

_\----_

_We have so many firsts and lasts, the pair of us, it's a wonder we can carry them all._

_///_

_summer song_

“Steve… Psst. Steve. Stevieeeeee. Steven Grant _Rogerssss_ _—_ ”

“What,” Steve grumbles, pulling a pillow over his head. “The. Fuck. Are you doing here?” 

“Ooh,” Bucky whispers, his hand heavy on Steve’s shoulder, shaking him none too gently. “Watch out, big guy, anymore’uh that sweet talk and I might just drop my panties.” 

Steve’s thighs clench without his permission, and why does Bucky have to be so goddamned _irritating_ , saying stupid shit with perfect mouth and smelling sharp and musky right next to Steve’s fucking _face —_

“Get _out,_ ” Steve groans, only half joking. He removes the pillow from his face and swings it into Bucky’s instead. He catches it, the bastard, and hugs it close to his chest, smiling so wide that it makes Steve wheeze. 

“C’mon,” he says, yanking Steve’s covers off. “Up, up, up, birthday boy!”

“It ain’t my birthday ye- _et — Buck!_ ” Steve yelps as Bucky closes a hand around his ankle, dragging him from his bed despite his kicking and clawing. “Fuck _you,_ stop it!”

“Careful, Stevie,” Bucky grunts, struggling to move him bodily towards the bedroom window with one hand. “You wake up your ma talkin’ like that and she’ll shine your rear.”

His mother is not the rear-shining kind, but the thought of waking her is enough to make Steve lower his volume. Still, he wriggles away, crossing his arms and feeling himself go red to the tips of his ears. He plants his feet on the ground, feeling terribly near and _nude_ in nothing but his undershirt and boxer shorts. 

“Where are we going?”

Bucky, already half on the fire escape, stoops to poke his head in. Like this, they’re of a similar height, and even in the dark, Steve can see Bucky’s eyes glint like two silver dimes. It chases a shiver up his spine, all traces of sleep evaporating and sizzling into the humid air, a cloud of steam hovering around the both of them. Bucky just smiles, earnest and dazzling. Steve blinks, sticky and short of breath. _Damn_ Bucky to hell, really.

“I got a surprise,” Bucky says, practically bouncing on his heels. “But it’s not _—_ not here. Just come on, you’ll see.”

Steve looks at his friend, really looks. He knows the twitch in Bucky’s fingers and the way his mouth pulls higher to one side _—_ the way he looks as he checks over Steve’s latest black eye or bloodied lip, or when they sneak some of Mr. Barnes’ fancy scotch, or he cuts school to sit by Steve’s sickbed. All keyed up, and waiting for Steve to fall into step beside him. It’s a familiar dance, so familiar he could do it backwards and blindfolded. 

That’s how Steve ends up on the roof of his building, feet dangling over the street below, a marijuana cigarette in his hand. The night is purple and yellow like an old bruise, illuminated by the streetlamps and a few stray windows whose inhabitants never seem to sleep. Bucky sits solid and warm beside him, attentive and a little manic. 

“Where’d you even get this?” Steve asks, idly rolling the joint between his fingers. 

“Kid at school,” Bucky shrugs, averting his eyes.

Steve knows about cannabis peripherally. His mother’s a nurse, and it isn’t uncommon to see tinctures of it on the shelves in any old pharmacy. He knows enough to know that high society mothers are driven into hysterics by the very idea of smoking the flower, convinced their precious children are only a puff away from living in a paper bag, ruined and fallen from grace. He’s heard an earful or two about it from Mrs. Barnes, who is particularly worried for Steve given his “circumstances”. 

Winnie Barnes is the only person who refuses to just call Steve “poor”, and he’s always equal parts touched and humiliated.

“Well, well, well,” Steve knocks their ankles together, smirking. “James Barnes, Brooklyn’s own prodigal son is smokin’ reefer cigarettes, slummin’ it at Red Hook. Better watch out for your reputation, Buck.”

Bucky goes quiet, leaning away an inch. He does that more and more often these days, ever since they began going to different high schools. Steve will look over to find Bucky’s eyes glazed and his mouth serious, brow twisted. Sometimes in that silence, Bucky’s gaze will turn to Steve. His face turns sadder and fiercer, and it always makes him look a little older, a little rougher, and a little more unnervingly _attractive._

A dark, slithery feeling creeps up behind Steve in those moments. _Fear_ , cold and miserable, and it makes him mad enough to spit, mad enough to fight the sun in the sky. 

Bucky is a senior come fall, and after that he’s bound for university, just like his father before him. Bucky has grown into a man, and Steve is still just _Steve,_ holding onto him for dear life. 

It’s like having the earth crumble under your feet. He keeps on digging his heels in, and he grabs and clutches, but when he opens his eyes, there are only armfuls of air. Upended, floating upside down with all the blood rushing to his head, desperate to fight his way back to the ground. 

But he can’t. Not if Bucky lets go. Steve desperately wants to pretend he doesn’t know why that is, but he’s not the best at lying, and he’s got more than a few suspicions on the subject.

“Let’s light this thing already,” Steve says. 

Bucky pulls a box of matches from his front pocket. The crackle and fizz of the little flame throws Bucky’s face into relief, turning his eyes from moon grey to a blue-green taken straight from the East River, clear and sparkling on a sunny day. Steve wishes for his watercolors with vibrant need. 

The smoke is already making Steve’s breath catch, and that explains what Steve’s nebulizer is doing there on the ground beside them. He hasn’t used it in ages, not since he’d started on the asthma cigarettes. The sight of it mixes with the pensive cloud hanging over his head, and sends Steve’s stomach roiling with shame and fury. He avoids Bucky’s eyes, and seething with inadequacy, lifts the joint to his mouth, inhaling as deep as he can, and _—_ shit _, shit._

It’s like someone lit one of those matches behind his nose and let it fall down the tender inside of his throat. He sputters, like he’s accidentally snorted water, but when he hacks violently, it’s wisps of smoke that come out instead. Steve gasps for breath, holding out his hand when Bucky grabs for the nebulizer. Tears well at the corners of his eyes, but he manages to choke in half a lungful of air between retching coughs, and he knows he’s in the clear. He closes his eyes and presses his hands to the clammy concrete, taking slow, even breaths. Bucky rests a hand on Steve’s back, rubbing in circles. This dance, too, is an old one, familiar between them.

“No attack?” Bucky asks, soft and suspicious, as if he might scare a fit from Steve’s lungs if he’s too loud.

“Not yet,” Steve laughs. His voice is rough like he swallowed a handful of nails. He’s lightheaded too, and his chest is tight, but that’s nothing unusual. If he were anyone else, maybe he’d be almost pleased with the routineness of it all. Really, Steve is hardly ever pleased. “Guess all that practice was good for somethin’.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Bucky chuckles back, and Steve passes the cigarette to him. 

They go back and forth that way, fingers brushing and thighs pressed together. It washes over Steve slowly, this sense of _ease_ , like someone’s taken an eraser to all the aches and pains in his body, and tucked him into bed. Or maybe laid him down on the shore of some beach, so that the waves wash up over him, making him salty and clean. 

The world goes a little bit crabwise, and Steve is seized with the urge to dance. But his limbs are much too heavy to stand. Normally, he wouldn’t think of it at all: He’s no Fred Astaire, even sober. But just now, he’s full of something that’s just like sleepiness, syrupy and rich. The thought appears in his head, simple and soft: _Bucky loves to dance._ Next thing Steve knows he’s on his back and he reaches his hands up into the air, lets them sway and do a little ballet in place of his feet, cutting shapes and patterns out of the air with his fingers like a blade on tissue paper.

Beside him, Bucky giggles, propped up on his elbow, face resting in the cradle of his palm. Steve looks up at him, and at the sight of his smile and crinkled eyes, feels pleasantly warm and gooey, his insides a half baked birthday cake. Steve starts laughing too, without meaning to, and he finds he can’t stop. 

He points at Bucky, accusatory and inexplicably amused and awed by every single thing about the boy next to him. The longer he looks at the lines of Bucky’s shoulders and the tan on the apples of his cheeks, and even the shape of Bucky’s earlobes, the gooier he feels, and the harder he laughs.

“Quit it,” Steve gasps, and his voice sounds very strange to him. It feels as if he’s talking very loudly, or hearing himself from underwater. 

“What?” Bucky snorts, beaming and beaming and beaming, so _beautiful_ and luminous. He’s like a piece of art, or a natural landmark; breathtaking in that lasting sort of way that makes people cry. Steve’s eyes feel wet and _damn,_ he thinks, what a man Bucky is, to have broken the air so sweet and bright, unable to help outliving the earth and all her stars.

“Stop making me laugh!”

“I ain’t even doin’ nothin’, Stevie!” 

They’re both clutching at their stomachs and kicking their feet like babies, feeling ridiculous and leaning very heavily into their mutual excuse not to care. Steve’s body is pinned to the roof, rooted by Bucky’s side, and it’s as comforting as the weight of a dozen blankets.

“Are too,” Steve shouts, or thinks he shouts. He can’t tell. “Am I talkin’ loud?”

“Always, Stevie,” Bucky ribs him, and Steve just laughs and then laughs some more, and calls Bucky a jerk, because _oh_ . It really, really ain’t fair what a picture Bucky makes, shirt untucked and hair ruffled in the faint breeze. All stretched out like a housecat, face suspended slightly over Steve’s like a second sky. He _really_ wants his watercolors, and his charcoal, and his _—_

“Hey, hey, hey,” Steve paws at Bucky’s shirt, and Bucky’s eyes blow up big like balloons but Steve doesn’t pay that any mind. Bucky’s always looking at him funny. “This reminds me of a poem.”

“Read it to me,” Bucky says instantly. “I wanna hear.”

His voice is suddenly quiet and intent, breaking through the buzz forming a halo around Steve’s head and ears. It seizes something in his chest and grips it tight, and nothing else matters. Steve doesn’t have the book, but the poem is one of his favorites and he thinks he can remember.

He starts a few times, but then the air feels too serious and the pinch in Bucky’s brow makes him giggle, and the two of them get stuck there for a while before Steve is able to make his mouth feel like a human mouth again. 

(“Touch it, touch it,” Steve slobbers, trying to speak while sticking out his tongue. “It feels weird, touch it, Buck, seriously!”

“ _No,_ ” Bucky squeals and wiggles and cringes as if tickled. “Ew!”)

The words do come eventually, materializing behind his eyelids. It feels like they’re using him as a vessel, like he isn’t in control at all. He just lays there, staring up at the few winking stars that are able to peep out from behind Brooklyn smog. They twinkle softly, like they’re afraid to be caught, as though they too are brutally high and reciting vaguely romantic poetry when they really oughtn’t be. And the words come, come, come.

“ _Wanderer moon_

_smiling a_

_faintly ironical smile_

_at this_

_brilliant, dew-moistened_

_summer morning,—_

_a detached_

_sleepily indifferent_

_smile, a_

_wanderer's smile,—_

_if I should_

_buy a shirt_

_your color and_

_put on a necktie_

_sky-blue_

_where would they carry me?”_

They lay there in the quiet for a while after Steve finishes, listening to the world hum. The scream of cicadas and car horns groaning have a rhythm and a melody, the sour smell of New York summer swaddles them both like newborn babes. A great, big bird seems to open its wings inside Steve’s chest, tickling at his heart and his throat, and he thinks with an embarrassing amount of sentiment that he wouldn’t ever want to live anywhere else in the world. 

“It’s pretty,” Bucky speaks up, leaning over into Steve’s line of sight again. “The poem. It’s _whimsical,_ yanno, like… like, um. _Alice in Wonderland_! But way less…” He wiggles his fingers, considering. “Creepy.”

“ _Alice in Wonderland_ isn’t creepy,” Steve protests, snickering. “That shit’s for little kids.”

“Is _too._ All that growing big, growing smaller bullshit, and the _—_ the being _underground!_ And the cat? That cat and his teeth gave me the _willies._ ”

“Ooh, big shot Bucky Barnes is afraid of the _Cheshire Cat_ , wait’ll the girls get a load’a this _—_ ”

“Je _sus —_ ”

“Hey, so I hear, dames like a man with a sensitive side _—_ ”

Bucky kicks him in the shin, half hearted and sloppy. “Aw, dry up, Rogers.”

Steve blows out a gusty sigh, bones loose. He wiggles his bare toes, dusty on the bottom and pearly white on top. They’re flat on the bottom, and they’re really funny-looking little feet, when he thinks about it. He looks over at Bucky, whose feet are not bare and do have arches like feet are meant to, and feels suddenly and painfully shy in his underwear. Everything about Bucky is the way it’s meant to be, and the feeling sits like a film on Steve’s skin.

“I wish I could do that.” 

“What, gimme the willies? Even your mug ain’t _that_ ugly, Steve.”

“Up yours,” Steve replies, feeling very far away indeed. “I meant, y’know, the _—_ the growing bigger thing.” 

Steve glances over to find Bucky leering at him, and Steve scoffs at him, pushing at his stupid, handsome face with the heel of his hand. They dissolve into another fit, but even as he laughs, Steve’s bones start to hollow out and fill with air. The world tips again, except this time it’s spilling Steve _out_ , like milk from a bottle or marbles from a little silk sack. 

He jerks with the sensation of it, and he wonders distantly what it feels like to be a planet. 

Is it like this? Spinning all alone, wanting nothing more than to come down, and be _held,_ only there’s no down to come to? But then, planets had other planets, and suns, and moons to keep them in line, to _hold_ them. Not Steve. Steve’s just floating away, a kite without a string, a planet without a _—_

“I like you the size you are.” 

Steve’s brain stops racing in circles and he slams back down into his body hard enough to jostle his vision, heart sticking slow in his chest. He turns his head towards Bucky, who is gazing at him with that gentle honesty and _glowing_ so sweetly. 

Steve wants to cry, wants to shriek, wants to punch Bucky’s lights out. He wants to reach out and touch him, wants to sink his teeth into the meat of Bucky’s shoulder, wants to _thank_ him until his voice is ragged and his lungs are empty. 

Bucky is _here,_ and it occurs to Steve that nearly everything he’s ever wanted has always been accompanied by the weight of Bucky’s arm around his shoulders, making sure Steve’s strange, flat feet touch the ground. 

“You’re like the moon,” Steve blurts, breathless, succumbing to the shining epiphany. A smack in the face. “You carry me.” 

Bucky blinks, and vaguely, Steve is aware that he wasn’t supposed to have said that aloud, because it breaks the rules. The Rules, which outline that Bucky is dashing and generous and kind, and too willing to be what other people want him to be. 

The Rules also stipulate that Steve, as someone who is prickly and spiny and generally disruptive to, oh, the _universe,_ must do his best not to take advantage of that. Steve supposes this is where the disruptive bit comes in, and really, rules that want to be followed shouldn’t be reliant on his natural instinct to bulldoze through any and all kinds of restrictions, especially ones involving Bucky.

“Sorry,” Steve backtracks nonetheless, sliding away, but Bucky follows.

Steve looks up, to the angles of his friend’s face, just barely touched with leftover baby fat. Bucky’s eyes are heavy and lidded, and Steve watches the pale knot of his Adam’s apple work as he swallows. 

Bucky licks his lips, a childhood tick that has had a special knack for sending Steve into a frenzy ever since eighth grade. He realizes, belatedly, that Bucky has set a hand on either side of Steve’s face, hovering so close that Steve can see the sweat pooling in the dip of his cupid’s bow, and _how_ many times has Steve drawn that mouth? Too many, too too many. Steve has filled sketchbooks with it, scratched it into the margins of overdue math homework, traced it onto his very own palms unthinkingly. 

It occurs to him that his friend’s lips are moving, that oh, _oh_ he’s talking. 

“What?” Steve mumbles, flushed to the tips of his ears, far too distracted by the way their chests press together with every breath. Bucky leans down further, closer to Steve’s good ear.

“Happy birthday,” he repeats, his eyes crinkling at the corners, his breath hot on Steve’s face. 

_Thanks,_ Steve wants to say, _thank you._

Instead, he leans up and touches his mouth to Bucky’s. 

It’s soft _—_ salty. Steve can feel the cleft of the older boy’s chin, and the tickle of his eyelashes, can taste the sting of his toothpaste, the smoke that lingers on the corners of his lips. Steve sighs through his nose, and lets their lips rest against each other that way, closed and flat. 

Then, he pulls away and lets his skull thunk back onto the concrete. 

A little punishment. It doesn’t even hurt that much.

Bucky’s breath fans across Steve’s cheeks again, and he makes a tiny hurt noise, searching Steve’s face with his eyes. One of his hands comes up to hold Steve’s jaw, hard enough that Steve flinches a little, and after that they’re kissing in earnest. Bucky is saying things like, “god, _Steve_ ” and “you, you, _you_ ” between pecks and smacks, and it goes to Steve’s head much faster than the cigarette had. 

They chase each other’s mouths back and forth, tides lapping at the shore and rocking the world, and Steve might be turning upside down, but Bucky’s hands are on his chest and face and that’s more than enough to suspend him.

\---

_You and your wanderer smile. My wanderer moon. Gonna be the death of me, or maybe the life of me, hell, what do I know? Maybe that’s what you are. The blood in my veins. The thump in my chest. You make me so stupid. Stupider, anyway. Always have._

_I'm even stupider without you, though. So come home, will you?_

_///_

_january morning //_ XII

_Long yellow rushes bending_

_above the white snow patches;_

“Whatcha drawin’?” 

“Hm?”

“I _said_ , what’re you drawin’?”

“Oh.” 

“So… what is it?”

“What?”

“Ugh,” Bucky wails, flinging himself across Steve’s legs. “Pay _attention_ to me.”

“I’m busy,” Steve replies, laughter already creeping into the corners of his eyes. 

Bucky begins climbing his way over Steve’s body. Steve keeps his eyes resolutely on his sketchbook, a half smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. Bucky looms over him, and Steve finally cuts him a look, all eyebrows and nonchalance, until Bucky bats the sketchbook out of his hands so that it lands oil pastel side up on the floor. 

“ _Hey_ ,” Steve squawks indignantly, as Bucky puts a hand on either side of Steve’s head, pressing him back into the arm of the Rogers’ worn and sun bleached couch. 

“Hey yourself,” Bucky returns, leaning in to rub their noses together, planting a tiny kiss on Steve’s upper lip. 

“Buck, I’m’unna,” Steve begins, dazed and giggling, ticklish down to the bones. “I got pastels on me, hey, _hey_ , they’re getting all over _you_ , jerk!” 

Bucky looks down at the new stain on his crisp white shirt, pale blue as a summer afternoon. It’s a smudgy handprint, wide palmed and long fingered right over the left breast pocket, right over his heart. Unwitting, Steve covers the stain back up, fits his hand right into it, and Bucky looks at him from under his lashes, grinning.

_purple and gold ribbon_

_of the distant wood:_

“What in _fuck_ were you thinking?” 

Steve rolls his eyes, tonguing at his own split lip. Bucky backs him up against the bathroom sink, tending to the nasty cut above Steve’s eyebrow. 

“Honestly, I was just wonderin’ if one of these days I’ll finally get my spine knocked straight.”

“Don’t be cute with me, Rogers,” Bucky hisses. “I told you to leave it alone _—_ ”

“You _told_ me, right, like I’m your motherfucking lapdog _—_ ”

“Shut the fuck up, you _know_ I don’t mean it that way. Don’t go pickin’ no fight with _me,_ Steven Grant.”

“He called you a fairy, Buck,” Steve spits, low, in his chest where it aches. He smolders like an ember. “If he _—_ if shit like that gets around …”

A breath punches out of Bucky, and Steve fixes his stare on the floor, eyeing the new scuffs on Bucky’s pristine shoes, the mud at the edges of his immaculately creased pants. 

It’s Steve’s fault, and it tears through him that _he’s_ doing this to his best friend, dragging Bucky into this fight that Steve’s in with the entire mortal plane. 

Steve’s mind wanders to the two older fellas that live down the hall from Steve and his mother, and the fond look the landlady gives them when he and Bucky walk too close. He thinks about how Mrs. Barnes frets about Bucky walking Steve home at night, and Mr. Barnes looms a little longer than he should when Steve comes over, and about Bucky’s quaffed school friends who all call him “James” and “Jim”, who all have steady girls.

“Stop that,” Bucky whispers, his hand closing around Steve’s wrist. “Stop thinkin’ whatever you’re thinkin’.”

“Buck.”

“ _No,_ ” Bucky’s fingers tighten. “I don’t _care_ , hear me? Look at me.” 

Bucky takes one of Steve’s hands, presses it to his own cheek. Steve can feel the prickle of his stubble, the smooth skin underneath. Bucky mouths at Steve’s raw knuckles, lays a kiss over the blue veins on his wrist. He looks up at Steve with those salt water eyes and shakes his head. 

“I don’t care.”

_what an angle_

_you make with each other_

“Shit!”

“ _Fuck._ ”

“Sorry,” Bucky swears, rubbing his forehead. “You okay?”

“And you say I got a thick skull,” Steve grouses, clutching his own head and falling back on his pillows. He squints at a ray of twilight streaming through the window of their bedroom, shining directly into his eyes. “I think you fuckin’ concussed me.”

“Don’t be dramatic,” Bucky leans back and stretches. He’s still straddling Steve, affording the smaller boy a glimpse at the athletic lines of his torso and clavicle and the angle of his jaw. Steve has long discarded Bucky’s godforsaken denim uniform top, exposing the sparse chest hair that lay beneath. Steve shivers, reaching up to untuck the undershirt from Bucky’s pants, slipping his hands underneath to paw at the smoothness of Bucky’s belly. 

“Well, _hiya_ ,” Bucky grins, positively preening, and Steve rolls his eyes, very taken by the broad smile and very unwilling to admit it. “You want somethin’?”

“ _Tchh_ ,” is all Steve can come up with, but it’s just as well, because Bucky bends to kiss at the corner of Steve’s mouth anyway, sweet and brimming with pride. 

Steve drags his tongue across Bucky’s teeth, “Vain son’uva bitch, you are, Barnes.”

“Punk. You love me,” Bucky’s voice is rough, and his hands are cupping Steve’s neck, skimming up the ticklish skin of his ribs, cradling the hollows of his cheeks. Steve is lost, gone to the world, aware of only Bucky’s lips at his throat, the heady scent of his pomade driving Steve slowly mad. Steve is _held,_ and lifted, and oh, he is caught and snared so completely. 

“I do,” Steve responds, absent and sincere, hands gripped tight in Bucky’s dark waves. 

Bucky’s eyes are on him in an instant, and Steve’s tongue feels too big in his mouth. He freezes, exposed, and for a moment they just look at each other. It feels like decades, like _ages._ But Bucky just fixes him with one of those soft smiles that should belong solely to sunsets, and candlelight, and the warm, buttery taste of fresh bread. He kisses Steve’s upper lip, once. Twice. Three times. 

It’s just like every time they’ve ever necked, and nothing like it at all, because this is night time and they are grown ups and they are _lovers_. 

They _love_ each other, in that way that means they don’t have to tuck it into corners or kick it underneath places. Not here, not in their bed, in their home. They can _love_ each other here, out loud. 

“ _You,_ ” Bucky says, with conviction, and it almost frightens Steve, the way he doesn’t want to let him go. 

_as you lie there in contemplation._

\---

_I’d tear the world to shreds just so it could fit into your hands, you know that? I hope you know. You keep me right side up. Without you, all it takes is a stiff wind and I’m a goner._

_///_

_trees_

“Wanna know my favorite poem?” Bucky asks. 

It’s barely a whisper, the staticky suggestion of a storm on the way. A low, faint rumble under the earth, while the air up above goes thick and stagnant. Bucky hiccups a breath in, and it trembles back out, wavering like water in a glass.

Steve turns his head to squint at him. Bucky looks almost purple, his face cut sharp and sinister in the streetlamp light that filters in through their bedroom window. His eyes look deep and inky in the hollows of his face. Steve wants to draw him, in violent shadow and blue pen ink, wants to press Bucky into paper so intimately that it rips and bleeds all over his hands.

“Yeah, Buck,” Steve says back, same volume. “Read it to me.”

“It’s that one about the tree on the hill, all twisted up? Reminds me of you.” 

Bucky talks as if he’s far away, as if they’re separated by glass, or a sheet. Like he’s reaching out with his voice. Steve lets their hands touch where they lay side by side like paper dolls on top of the covers, stiff and afraid to sleep. 

“Read it to me,” he repeats, louder this time, and Bucky stands to grope for the book on the bedside table, where it nearly always rests. 

Steve watches as Bucky stands over the bed, bringing the book close to his eyes. He makes no move to turn on the light, and neither does Steve. He wants Bucky to come back to bed, but he doesn’t make a move to pull him in either. He just goes as still as he can, listening to Bucky’s gentle breaths hit the weathered pages as he reads, and opens himself up to the rustle of paper and bedsheets and the words that Bucky whispers into the space between them. 

_“Crooked, black tree,_

_ridiculously raised one step toward_

_the infinite summits of the night:_

_even you the few grey stars_

_draw upward into a vague melody_

_of harsh threads._

_Bent as you are from straining_

_against the bitter horizontals of_

_a north wind,—there below you_

_how easily the long yellow notes_

_of poplars flow upward in a descending_

_scale, each note secure in its own_

_posture—singularly woven._

_All voices are blent willingly_

_against the heaving contra-bass_

_of the dark but you alone_

_warp yourself passionately to one side_

_in your eagerness._ ”

When he finishes, Bucky’s eyes are drifting over to his dress uniform, all ironed and shiny. Steve stings with shame. 

He’d been wanting for a uniform of his own not hours ago, but in the half-light of the wee hours, the thing looms like a spector. All laid out over their squashy armchair, present and curdling the air around itself the way unwanted houseguest does. Steve half expects it to slither into an about face and march out the door all on its own tomorrow morning. He wishes it would. 

“You’re the tree, see?” Bucky looks back at Steve now, earnest and smiling a terrible, twisted smile. He clutches the book. “All bent against the wind, standing out against everything. Always standing up tall, reaching high for the stars. That’s you all over, Stevie.”

“Buck,” Steve says, aching. He reaches his hand out, but Bucky turns his face to the ceiling, coiled up taught, a wild pulse beating at his bared throat. Steve startles quiet for a moment. 

“I love you,” Bucky whispers. His eyes are shut tight now. “You know that, right?”

“Stop,” Steve hisses. He feels a dry wind churn up and blow through his veins, making waves in still waters and cutting down trees. A trickle of sweat creeps down his back, ugly and slow. 

He reaches for Bucky again, clumsily, like his limbs are too long. He’s never wanted to be smaller before, but now feels like folding himself up and laying himself down in Bucky’s suitcase, right next to the crinkled up draft letter. There seem to be miles between them, and Bucky does not close the distance. He only tightens his fingers where they hold the poems. 

“Steve, please just let me,” he pleads, and Steve thinks his knuckles must be white, but he can’t see for the darkness and the distance, and it makes him seethe like nothing ever has before.

“ _No_.” Steve nearly spits. Bucky’s chest produces a fine shudder, as though he might splinter and shake apart. “You’re comin’ home.” 

Bucky shakes his head, jaw clenched, “Oh, god, Steve.” 

“You _are.”_

“Steve,” Bucky moans it, a deathbed moan. He sways on his feet, still shaking his head. “I can’t not come back to you. I can’t do it, Steve, I can’t.”

The winds billowing through Steve’s chest threaten to snap him into pieces, into ribbons, and burn him up right there in the air where he hangs, reaching out. A near shout tears through his chest, as Bucky tries to straighten up, take control of the trembling corners of his mouth. He’s so far away and Steve can’t _take_ it.

“Come _here_ ,” he demands, and Bucky, as though coming out of a trance, finally does, tearing across the room and bending over to set his hands on the mattress. Steve goes up on his knees to meet him, grabs Bucky’s face between his hands, his nails digging into the holds of Bucky’s cheekbones. 

“You are coming home,” Steve almost chants it, squeezing tighter when a tear trickles over one of his knuckles. 

“You can’t know that,” Bucky’s words are barely more than sound, raw and animal.

“The fuck I can’t,” Steve snarls back. 

He _knows._ He knows it like the blood follows him around the streets and stains his clothes. A perpetual red shadow, a hot trail that belongs inside him but keeps escaping, like it needs to water the goddamn earth under his feet. He knows what’s in him, so full that it brims and bubbles over. He knows what’s in Bucky too. He knows.

“There is not a damn place on this earth you could go that I couldn’t get to you.”

“Steve,” Bucky sighs, face crumpling and turning away again, but Steve holds him by the chin.

“No, you look at me,” Steve can feel himself shaking, life the last leaf on the last tree in all of autumn. “Don’t you dare think like that. You can’t _._ You have to know like I know, you _have_ to.”

It’s so dark in their room that Steve can scarcely see where his fingers end and Bucky’s face begins, but he thinks that’s okay. Maybe it’s better that way. He imagines his hands turning to smoke, to essence, and sinking into Bucky’s skin. He imagines that when the sun rises, Bucky will be stained with Steve’s fingerprints, tattooed so deeply that time could never weather him out. Then Bucky would see, would always see.

“Don’t cry,” Bucky says, and Steve hadn’t felt the tears prick his eyes, hadn’t felt them overflow because everything is already spilling out. Maybe his fingerprints will stand out in more than just black on Bucky’s skin. Maybe they’ll be red like his blood, sparkle translucent like his tears. Yellow like the way they make love. 

Well, that’s just fine. If Steve has a secret wealth of color inside him, he doesn’t want it. Not if Bucky can have it instead, can smooth it over his fevered skin, can cup it in his hands like a drink, like a tincture to soothe every worry and pain. Let him take it, take it all, and Steve can bleed dry and die happy. 

“Just say ‘okay’,” Steve tells him, suddenly tired, but Bucky doesn’t.

Instead, he slides to his knees beside the bed, and lowers his head, like he might pray. In the stillness, Steve sits down on the edge of the mattress, and lets Bucky press his damp forehead onto his bare thigh. Bucky’s hands come up to clutch at Steve’s calves, and Steve runs his hands over Bucky’s scalp, loosens the leftover pomade and traces patterns onto the sensitive skin at his neck.

“Tell me,” Bucky says in hushed tones, in the ticklish place just above Steve’s knee. “Please.”

“I love you,” Steve assures Bucky, and he says it again when Bucky’s mouth opens against Steve’s skin in a sob, and again and again until the sun rises from the cradle of the horizon, and ushers them both out the door. 

He says it until he can’t anymore, until they’re face to face in front of the train platform, Winnifred and Rebecca standing just behind them, tearful from their own goodbyes. They keep a respectable distance, averting their eyes and pretending not to listen, and Steve is grateful. 

“You’ll probably see a lot of trees out there,” Steve manages, as casual as he can. 

Bucky’s face twists, and he reaches out to pinch the cuff of Steve’s coatsleeve between his fingers for a moment. It’s just a little, subtle movement, because Bucky’s always been a better actor than Steve. Still, his voice catches when he speaks. 

“None that’ll compare with Brooklyn trees, though,” he says, strained. “You know that.”

Steve chuckles, too soft. “I know.”

Out of his coat, he pulls a slip of paper, ripped along the edge. He tucks the poem into the breast pocket of Bucky’s uniform. Steve rests his hand there briefly, over Bucky’s heart, and Bucky shifts to grasp his wrist. 

They linger too long, but in this crowd, no one is looking. It’s just one more possible-last touch, another hopefully-not-last look, another bracing smile, in a sea of goodbyes. Steve realizes the world is too selfish to spare them a second glance right now, and for once, the thought warms him. 

“Wait for me,” Bucky says, just before he steps onto the platform. In the moment, the semantics are a bit lost on Steve, as the train starts a storm of flying dust and flapping coats. It leaves him feeling confused, unsteady. He walks with the train, then runs after it as it picks up steam, head swimming. 

_But you’re the one who’s going,_ Steve wants to reply. 

There isn’t time to say it, though.

\---

_I can’t bring myself to regret any of it. Sitting around and waiting was never a strong point for me. It still isn’t. But it’s different now. We’re different. How couldn’t we be? Maybe it’s stupid or naive of me, but I’m glad we are. I’m glad because it means I’m ready now. I’m ready to wait for you, this time. I’ll hold as still as you need me to, and I’ll wait. I’ll wait for you forever._

_///_

_a portrait in greys_

Steve finds it in the bottom of the box of shit S.H.I.E.L.D. hands over to him after he’s woken up.

He’d forgotten how small it is in the great big palms of his hands, like a little pocket bible. The kind people who never actually attended church would carry in their coats, untouched until they brush up against it reaching for their wallets. He runs a finger over the cover, afraid it might crumble to dust and slip through his fingers. 

It was old when it found its way into Steve’s life, a secondhand copy his mother had given him for his birthday. He supposes someone else might find it comforting. A momento, a piece of the past to thumb through. Steve feels too many things about the sight of it to parse through it all, but above all is a peculiar sorrow for the battered thing. 

_AL QUE QUIERE!_ it creaks. Where it had once sang like a music box or a valiant horn, the title seems to scream now, a horrible banshee’s noise. Tired, tinny, a gramophone in the age of stereos and mp3 players. 

It oughtn’t have survived this long. That’s not what books are for. 

They aren’t supposed to rest in a dark, dusty box somewhere in the corner of a basement, unopened and unread, contents unspoken. Poems are meant to live on people’s lips, to be exchanged like breath. Poems are supposed to be yellow - the world on fire at sunset. Not the color of vinegar, distressed and well-preserved. 

He sets it on his bookshelf, tucked in beside all the shiny new books about all the incarnations of the world that have risen and gone to dust in his absence. It feels like a betrayal. It doesn’t belong in this apartment any more than he does. They’re just relics, the both of them. Only the world can’t seem to part with either of them.

He does end up opening the book, later. He shouldn’t really, he knows he shouldn’t, but he had woken up to the baby pink dawn overcome with a strange, irrational fear that the little volume wouldn’t be there when he looked. So he draws the curtains, and takes the book off the shelf, shaking from the inside out, desperately cold.

It’s spring outside, and the air is fresh with rebirth and sticky-warm rain. It brings back flesh memories of thick green pollen settling on the late afternoon air, the shake of Bucky’s laughter beside him as Steve sneezed fitfully. Bucky had always hated his own birthday, but he did like the way Steve wore March on his skin, all pink and freckled. Without him here, Steve cannot bring himself to step out into the sun. He grows pale by the light of his reading lamp instead.

Steve supposes he should go and visit Bucky’s grave, but the thought alone is enough to rattle him down to the bones. 

Steve can imagine himself doing it, getting all dressed up in a crisp shirt and bringing a wreath of flowers like any decent person would. He would bring cornflowers and poppies and black-eyed susans, like the kind that had sprung from between the sidewalk in Park Slope when they were children. He would stand in front of the headstone, and present the flowers, and talk to the little burial plot aloud, the way he had done when he used to visit his mother’s resting place.

But the nasty thing is that Bucky isn’t beneath that headstone. Winifred Barnes buried an empty casket. Steve is certain that as long as the Barneses were alive, Bucky’s grave was never bare of flowers or ribbons or little plastic American flags, but Steve can’t play pretend that way.

Steve has seen where Bucky was really laid to rest, and all it was was white, white, white, forever and ever, stretching on for miles. No amount of wildflowers is going to bring Bucky home from the war. Or Steve for that matter. All the best parts of him are laid down beside Buck on that colorless mountainside. Steve’s leached of color too now. Stuck in the world like dead tooth, all bloodless and rotten.

So in lieu of flowers, he opens the book up, and a page flutters out and sails to the floor in a sweeping zig zag, the edge of it curled from where it was torn out and tucked back into place. It’s soft around the middle where it had been folded, tucked into Bucky’s pocket. Steve’s fingers shake where he holds it. He’d thought Bucky had taken this poem with him too.

 _Crooked, black tree,_ it says to him in Bucky’s low rumble, warm and half-hysterical, all crazy the way he would get when he’d have to leave Steve’s side. Steve has the sudden and vicious idea that maybe Bucky’s soul is thrashing around out there, waiting for Steve even still. Even now.

He sucks in a breath and flips the page over. Until this moment, it never really occurred to Steve to think about the partner. Or hostage, more like, drug out of its home for the sake of it’s other side. Poems are like that. They go together better than they don’t. 

_Will it never be possible_

_to separate you from your greyness?_

_Must you be always sinking backward_

_into your grey-brown landscapes—and trees_

_always in the distance, always against_

_a grey sky?_

_Must I be always_

_moving counter to you? Is there no place_

_where we can be at peace together_

_and the motion of our drawing apart_

_be altogether taken up?_

_I see myself_

_standing upon your shoulders touching_

_a grey, broken sky—_

_but you, weighted down with me,_

_yet gripping my ankles,—move_

_laboriously on,_

_where it is level and undisturbed by colors._

A breath punches out of Steve at the sight of Bucky’s looping handwriting, tucked up underneath the poem. It’s smudged, written in that same blue ink that all Bucky’s letters from the front had been in. 

**_I had a thought. Maybe you and I are like clock hands. One of us always ticking out_** **_of rhythm, even though we’re part of each other. Maybe that’s it for us. Just watching each other spin by, forever and ever. Moving counter, just_** **_like Williams says. Maybe we won’t ever_** **_be at peace til the clock just fuckin’ stops._** **_I don’t know how long I can keep grabbing_** **_for you and missing._**

Steve doesn’t pick the book back up for another couple of months. It takes waking up on the side of the Potomac to even look at it again, but when he does, he holds a pen of his own in the other hand. Not long after that, the book really does disappear. He doesn’t look for it.

\---

_Happy birthday. I miss you._

_///_

_history_

_Oh, Sunday, day of worship! ! !_

It’s a Sunday the second-first time Bucky Barnes ever speaks to Steve Rogers.

“Bucky?” 

He sounds like he did on the bridge, and every muscle in Bucky’s body tenses. 

They’re standing in the middle of the Smithsonian, no more than a foot of space between them. The memorial with Bucky’s face stands out stark behind Steve’s head, and his wide, wide martyr eyes. Bucky feels his own bones evaporate, and god, he doesn’t understand much of anything anymore, but he knows this feeling. 

Bucky unsticks his brain enough to process the man before him, and he can’t help but curl his lip a little. The words fall out of his mouth without much thought:

“What the _fuck_ are you wearing?”

Steve looks down at his khakis and loafers, and his eyes go even bigger, like he’s surprised to find himself looking like an absolute dinosaur. He squints back up at Bucky, as though he has something to do with this, and Bucky laughs until he feels sick to his stomach.

_The steps to the museum are high._

_Worshippers pass in and out._

_Nobody comes here today._

They find a bench to sit on. Their breath is loud between them, each squeak of their shoe amplified in the empty museum. They don’t bother with the obvious questions like “how are you” or “what are you doing trespassing in the Smithsonian”. They know the answers. 

Steve does ask him, “What’ve you been reading?”

Bucky huffs. 

Steve is such an asshole.

_… love is an oil to embalm the body._

Truly, sometimes Bucky can hardly stand to read at all. Words jump out at him and swirl on the page like water sucked down a drain. And when he can, the phrases stick in his brain, and wrap around his neck like a scarf tied just a shade too tight. Not really choking him, but throwing every breath and swallow into relief, reminding him that he’s alive.

He reads every poem in Steve’s voice, and it’s _terrible._

Worse still, is the cramped scrawl that accompanies each poem. Slanting and messy, smudged in spots, filling up all the available white space. 

_You helped keep me alive, you know? Back when a sneeze could’ve killed me. Ma said I was just too good to die, and you said I was too stubborn, but it was you, too. I know that for sure. How else could I be standing here?_

It tugs a weary grin onto his face. Steve never could shut the fuck up. 

If his heart weren’t stuck in his throat, Bucky might tease him. Might say something like, “Jesus Christ, Rogers, another guy’s already written this book. Write your own damn poems, why don’tcha?” 

And Steve would laugh, and call him a couple of names in return, and they could just sit still in that moment, let it ruffle and sway them like evening wind over grass.

_Your death? — water_

_spilled upon the ground —_

_though water will mount again into rose-leaves —_

_but you? — would hold life still,_

_even as a memory, when it is over._

Looking at him, there are these moments where Steve seems so different, and he is. Time has worn him smooth and round in places, like a stone faced up against the sea. He looks so old sometimes, like a sculpture, preserved and ancient and too tall, too solemn. He’s got lines around his eyes and his mouth is always pinched, the shape Sarah’s face took when Steve came home limping worse than usual.

He gazes at Bucky so soft now, like if he stares too hard Bucky will burst into dust, scatter away like ashes. In all honesty, Bucky’s not certain he wouldn’t, but it still makes his head twinge. It hurts to think it, but no fucking wonder it took him beating the dumbass within an inch of his life for things to slot into place. 

_I kept trying to live without you here, but God, it was miserable. It was like someone smudged out all my edges, so I was flat and grey, no dimension. Cardinal rule of drawing, you know? There’s no shadows to make interesting shapes when you ain’t got any light, and that’s what you are. Light._

_Mine._

But really, it’s still Steve behind it all. 

It’s always still Steve, different and the same, angry and fierce, hanging on too tight to anything liable to rip him to shreds. Steve, who spilt his own blood all over the streets of Brooklyn like it was the only way to make the earth remember he was here at all. 

The earth is still trying to pay him back, looks like.

_Here I am with head high and a_

_burning heart eagerly awaiting_

_your caresses, whoever it may be,_

_for granite is not harder than_

_my love is open, runs loose among you!_

_I arrogant against death! I_

_who have endured! I worn against_

_the years!_

Maybe he did too good of a job and made a big enough sacrifice for them both, the absolute fucking martyr. On bad days, Bucky resents it. He has wanted to die, maybe longer than he’s ever wanted to live, but Steve just won’t let him. 

_It’s funny. Life, time. Death. It all seems so final, until it isn’t anymore._

_I guess that’s the thing I always liked about books and poems. They can always be opened up again. Timeless. Forever. I didn’t think anything else was like that, but now I know better._

_You open me up still. You open me up everyday, even when I thought you were gone._

_Stupid of me, really. How could you be?_

_Maybe we ain’t the same poem, but we’re printed on the same page. Even if we get torn in two, there’s nothing on earth that can change that. All you gotta do is hold me up to the light, and there you are, bleeding right through me._

But god help him. 

Bucky loves him. 

Bucky loves Steve, loved him when he was six, and twelve, and sixteen, and twenty-five, and he loves him now, that stupid man who wears checked shirts and ugly khakis and sits in a museum with doe eyes, bent up small like a sinner in church. It’s in him, tattooed in Bucky’s marrow, tied up in his DNA, and it twists him up something terrible.

If he said as much right now, Steve would just look at Bucky with those saint eyes and say something dumb and simple and short like a poem, even though life isn’t like that at all. But Steve would be saying it, and so it would make sense, and for that one instant, all Bucky’s hurt would lift and pinwheel away _—_ maple seeds on the wind.

_The world is young, surely! Young_

_and colored like — a girl that has come upon_

_a lover! Will that do?_

And isn’t that the point of it all? 

They are here. Both of them.

Doesn’t it have to mean something?

_I love you, Buck._

“What’s it to you?” Bucky replies.

_///_

_riposte_

_Love is like water or the air_

_my townspeople;_

_it cleanses, and dissipates evil gases._

_It is like poetry too_

_and for the same reasons._

_Love is so precious_

_my townspeople_

_that if I were you I would_

_have it under lock and key—_

_like the air or the Atlantic or_

_like poetry!_

end. 

**Author's Note:**

> So this has been a journey. It didn't turn out how I really wanted, because life happens! In any case, I fell in love with Williams' words and the idea of telling a story with it. I hope y'all enjoyed!
> 
> Special thanks to my wonderful betas: https://b3tar3ad3r.tumblr.com/
> 
> and https://mcusekat.tumblr.com/
> 
> And to my amazing!!! artist, for bringing this fic to life: https://lisamott9.tumblr.com/


End file.
